Ahoy, Shipmates! Greetings from Malcolm Torres

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Ahoy, Shipmate!




I'm Malcolm Torres and my debut novel is SAILORS TAKE WARNING.  It's a mystery thriller set aboard the USS Nimitz.  Here's the teaser:  In two weeks the Nimitz will cross the equator where her crew of over 5,000 women and men will hold an ancient hazing ritual.  However, aboard the ship, things are amiss; a body is missing from the morgue and jets have been sabotaged on the flight deck. Can medical first responder Kate Conrad and deckhand Terrance McDaniels figure out what's going on before the ship crosses the Golden Line?


Since publishing SAILORS TAKE WARNING on Amazon in May 2014, I have been hard at work on my second novel.  SAILORS DELIGHT will be publishing later in 2014.  SAILORS DELIGHT is about a sailor, Christopher Marlow, who is left behind at Pearl Harbor on medical hold when his ship leaves for the war zone in the Persian Gulf.  In SAILORS DELIGHT, Christopher Marlow is Hospitalized in Hawaii, which means he goes surfing, scuba diving and nightclubbing -- that is when he's not at the hospital getting his head and his heart examined.  It's a tale of post traumatic stress ... Navy style.

My work differs from other Nautical Literature, sea stories and adventure thrillers in several ways.  First of all my characters are not crusty old salts on old wooden ships sailing off like the characters in Moby Dick or Treasure Island.  My characters are real people, like your cousin or sister who graduated from high school and joined the Navy.  I don't write about brave captains or daring fighter pilots.  My characters are salt-of-the-earth enlisted people who work aboard aircraft carriers and battleships.  They face problems such as long work hours, hard labor in rough conditions, extended periods at sea, short bursts of intense excitement while on liberty in ports like Honolulu, Hong Kong, Mombasa, Perth and Singapore.  Another thing that is different about my writing is that I do not glorify military technology, say for example the way Tom Clancy does in his high tech thrillers.  Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman who never spent a day working as a sailor (officer or enlisted) on a ship.  Everything Tom Clancy (God rest his prolific soul!) wrote is a concoction of recruiting posters and a defense contractor sales brochures.  Sure the rockets and missiles these days are accurate and some military people are patriotic, but the events in a Tom Clancy novel are not accurate when it comes to the day-to-day lives of the men and women who work below decks aboard a ship.  This does NOT, however, mean that I serve up heavy doses of reality.  What I do is add science fiction, horror, erotic suspense, substance abuse, crime and undercover investigations to the age old sea stories that sailors have been telling since people have been going to sea in ships.  My stories take place today, with real women and men who are trapped in outrageous-yet-plausible plots aboard ships or ashore in exotic locations.



I wrote SAILORS TAKE WARNING and I'm hard at work on SAILORS DELIGHT because I love to read and I want to write the kind of books that I would love to read.  I looked at my favorite books and found them full of intelligent characters who had to take action in the face of incredible odds.  Some of my favorite books are 1984, GO ASK ALICE, THE SEA WOLF, THE SHINING, THE GOOD EARTH and GONE GIRL.  I started writing as a teenager and have always had a voracious appetite for good books.  When I joined the Navy at 17 years old and went to sea aboard an aircraft carrier on the Western Pacific Ocean, I continued to read and write.  After I got out of the Navy, I went to the University of Colorado in Boulder where I took several writing classes and that's when I started pulling my stories and books together.  I have continued to work on my best pieces and feel strongly that I have several books and a collection of short stories that deal with my adventures in the US Navy.  Of course these books are not straight stories, they are elaborate tales (Sailors call them Sea Stories).  They are the kinds of outrageous yarns enlisted women and men tell each other.  They're fantastic stories, the only kind worth writing and the best kind to read.  I write my stories in a way that makes them accessible to anyone, not just sailors.  So don't be afraid to jump in and read SAILORS TAKE WARNING.  You can download the sample chapters free on Amazon. 

My writing process is pretty simple.  I use a blue Bic pen and a yellow legal pad for the rough draft.  Then I revise while typing the draft on my laptop.  Next I let the file sit for a few months or a year while I work on something else. Then I take another go at the manuscript, making heavy revisions to the characters and plot.  It's in this stage of development that a good story becomes a novel because it's here that the action is heightened, the tension tightened, the characters blown up into mythical beings and their actions emboldened.  The revision process is where the stakes are raised, where characters face challenges and threats to their values and their lives.  F. Scott Fitzgerald said you have to kill your darlings and it's true; you have to kill them with a bullet in the head or you have to hold them under water until they drown.  Then when I have the story where I think it needs to be, I give the manuscript to a few trusted readers (not a writing group or worse yet a writing professor--God no!) and ask for their feedback.  I listen very closely to their feedback and I fix some of the things they bring to my attention.  I use to send my queries and sample chapters to editors and agents but I received hundreds of form letters rejecting my work, so I stopped sending them out . . . but I never stopped writing.  Now with the eBook publishing revolution, I'm in the game.  SAILORS TAKE WARNING has sold over 100 copies in paperback and eBook in less than 3 months!  It has been rated  by over 10 reviewers on Amazon and GoodReads with an average 4.5-Star rating.  How about them apples?




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